i'm fragmented, just like glass
by bubblegum days
Summary: jade is too beautiful for past tense, but i was just ugly enough. / in which jade dies, beck becomes a nihilist, and tori tries her best to help.


**A/N: **Experimental, overly angsty piece. Too much symbollism. Trying to use something of a POV with the littlest information possible. Just another one of those fics where Jade dies. Other than that, I really think I got the way I wrote Beck's dialogue right. I apologize ahead of time if people seem like they're underreacting a little to Jade's death, specifically Tori, but the reasons for this is that Tori's only acting like that for Beck's benefit and everyone else is simply unimportant to Beck in his current state of mind. And that's what this is: Beck's current state of mind.

_._

_i'm fragmented, like glass._

_._

He doesn't go to her funeral and he doesn't ever make it to see her grave. The people who do tell him that it's beautiful, though, and that's enough for him to buy a lot of glass things (_ashtrays, vases, glasses, beer bottles) _and he spends the day after the alleged funeral throwing these things onto the sidewalk. The beer spills in a disgusting puddle and the glass becomes nothing but fragments of the rainbow.

And _damn it, he doesn't know whether he should stay alive so he can keep destroying things, or die because he doesn't want to feel so damn apathetic anymore._

.

He scribbles on his notebooks in class: _this is the only way i know how... _and draws little bottles of beers with smiley faces and bubbly eyes. He passes the notebooks to Tori who frowns at him and holds interventions for him and he tells them all to fuck off, go fuck themselves or fuck each other or fuck a monkey, he's not picky, just go away go away go away _now_.

He punches Trina's pretty little face and breaks her nose when she calls him _melodramatic, _and he hears Tori lead her away with her fingers curled into Trina's arm which is covered and a purple jacket and he can hear Tori whisper to Trina, fervently, _shut up idiot JADE DIED._

When André invites him over for a barbecue, Beck ends up resting his hand on the grill and gritting his teeth until André snatches his arm away and yells at _someone anyone _to bring a bucket of ice _stat _and Cat does, looking adorable in short shorts and a tank-top with half her hair pulled back, biting her lip and toppling over herself to bring a tin bucket filled with ice to Beck. Beck stays dazed when André dips his hand into the bucket for him, and the relief runs through his body and he shivers but it's not because of the relief. He doesn't get invited to any of the barbecues after that.

Rex offers him a sarcastic comment and Beck curls his fingers around Robbie's hair and rips out a chunk, which earns him a day's suspension for _aggravated assault beck why did you do it hollywood arts has a strict policy about violence and-_

.

He's the one that has to delete her Slap profile, but he logs onto her account (_she fed his passwords to him and him alone_) on his day's suspension and finds himself lost in her videos. The way her hair fell over her shoulders and the glint of her black nail polish against white finger skin clutching a black clutch purse makes tears roll down his cheeks and makes him reach for a bottle. He spends the whole day taking long swigs of beer and watching her videos over and over and over again, her beautiful voice and laugh and songs filling his head so that he doesn't think, only clicks _replay replay replay_.

.

He dreams of the way it happened.

Not-so-great tires squealing on wet roads. A car spiraling out of control, failing to stop and instead spinning straight into the traffic at an intersection, getting smashed between two cars and a forehead against a steering wheel, cracked like an egg.

Of how he was feeding his fish, his knees on the plush carpet, when the cell phone began vibrating wildly in his back pocket and when he pulled it out he frowned at the number. When he heard the too-formal voice of Jade's father on the other end saying _i'm sorry beck she's dead she died oh my god jade died it was a car accident oh my god i'm so sorry beck _and how he heard a grown man cry for the first time in a long time that day.

He sees this every time he falls asleep, and every time he wakes up he runs outside his RV to empty the contents of his stomach into the flowers next to the RV and maybe that's from his constant hangover, he doesn't know, and he stopped caring a long time ago.

.

But oh, he knows something they don't!

Maybe the tires on the wet cement wasn't an accident after all!

Or maybe it was simply a miscalculation!

.

He wants to turn back time. He takes up the habit of resetting clocks and buying hourglasses just so he can flip them over and over. He always seem to stay in the present, though, and that's bothersome.

(_The only time he can time travel is when he sees the blood and rain in his dreams._)

.

He decides to go out with a bang. He enlists the help of his hidden artistic side and spray-paints _JADE IS TOO BEAUTIFUL FOR PAST TENSE, BUT I WAS JUST UGLY ENOUGH _on the walls of Hollywood Arts. By walls, he means all of the outside ones. And on each one, he hurls a bottle of beer at it so the liquid makes an appropriately ugly stain on the beige and the glass slides to the ground.

He climbs to the top of the railing in the lunchroom area and fastens a bed out of an old, ratty black blanket of Jade's. He lies down on this and looks up at the stars and pulls out the first bottle of beer (he has twenty-four) and drinks it.

He remembers kissing the top of her head, the way her hair felt against his lips, the way she absolutely hated it when he did that.

Then a second.

He remembers kissing her forehead, the way he eyebrows crinkled, the way she absolutely hated that, too.

Then a third.

He remembers the way her eyes looked, buried beneath her hair and her facial piercing and the scowl she always wore and her heavy make-up and exaggerated eyelashes.

Her body is beautiful.

Her face is magnificent.

Her personality is extravagant.

He can't finish the beer, finds himself deep in the world of dreamland.

.

_beck_

Surely that's the voice of an angel.

_beck wake up_

He opens his eyes, slowly, to find Tori hovering over him.

_oh thank god beck what the fuck did you do you're going to be in a lot of trouble_

Her words don't mean anything to him. There is a pounding headache taking up most of his brain. The sunlight is practically nonexistent, though, thank God-wait, "Why are you here so early in the morning?" he grumbles.

_you sent me a text last night saying goodbye i painted the school in jade._

"Oh. That was stupid." It was, too. The spray-paint he used was red in color. Red for blood. Red for Beck.

_what where you trying to do beck_

"I was trying to drink myself to death. Thank you for interrupting."

_that's not healthy_

She crouches beside him now, next to the beer. He frowns when he sees that there's only five missing. "Look, Tori..."

"I am looking," she replies, taking a look around for emphasis. "And I see a lot of graffiti and broken beer bottles. What the fuck were you doing, exactly, Beck?"

"I was trying to destroy everything. . ."

"She was alive. Now she is dead. That's the only present tense that applies to her."

The world comes to a screeching halt for Beck.

"And you're not ugly either," Tori says, sighing. "Let me take you to Lane."

"I don't want to go to Lane. Lane doesn't know shit." This is true, or at least Beck thinks it's true.

"Come on, Beck. Up we go." She stands up and grabs his arm and actually succeeds at pulling he up. He moans and groans and pukes on the stairs. Tori makes a face at this, but they keep on moving. He thinks that his alcohol intolerance is shockingly small for someone who drinks as much as he does, and then remembers the blood painting pavement red (_not jade not jade not jade_) in his dreams. And he tries not to throw up again.

They don't talk on the way to Lane's office.

.

There's a collection of hourglasses on his dresser, all different in shapes and sizes, and all with all the sand painted on the bottom. On each hourglass he paints her name in green. Lane suggested it as a visualization exercise, but the only thing it succeeds at doing is making Beck very depressed. Tori's not picking up her phone, either, which is rather hypocritical of her. So Beck just sits on the floor of his RV and stares at the hourglasses. There's a slight smell off paint in the air.

Then there is a knock at the door, and Beck doesn't waste time wondering who it'll be. To his surprise, it's Tori, wearing a white dress with a brown jacket and brown boots and her hair is long and falling down her shoulders and back. She has a huge, multicolored purse and sunglasses perched on top of her nose. Why he decides this is important enough for his inner monologue, he doesn't know.

"You're right. Lane doesn't know shit. Luckily, Trina attends an excellent therapist." She invites herself in and hands him a business card.

He glances at it. There's a neat little number and a neat little name. "You really expect me to go to this person?" He asks, raising an eyebrow and shutting the door behind him.

"Yes, Beck. Leave the nihilism to the philosophers, sober up, and get over her death. She's not coming back. Accept it." Tori walks over to his bed and sits down on it.

"Nihilism?" He asks, completely ignoring everything else in her sentence. He sits on the bed beside her and stares at the hourglasses some more.

"I Googled _wanting to destroy everything_ and found this idea thing. Nihilism. The belief in nothing but to destroy. Beck Oliver, I believe you to be a nihilist, and we should fix that."

"Why do we need to fix it?" He asks, absentmindedly, suddenly wanting very much to play a game involving throwing beer bottles at hourglasses.

"Because there's too much stuff to believe in! Come on, Beck. I already scheduled an appointment for you." And she's tugging on his arm again.

.

He finds himself scribbling the phrase _Jade was too pretty for present tense, but I'm just ugly enough _in his notebook in class one day. He passes it proudly to Tori, not really caring about the teacher's leering eyes.

"Congratulations," Tori says back, in the middle of a test. She gets a zero, but he gets a smile from her, and he starts to feel like maybe everything is going to be okay-

.

"I'm sorry for your nose, Trina. I'm sorry for the hand-and-ice thing, André and Cat. I'm sorry for your hair, Robbie."

And he finds himself back in his life, sans a darkly beautiful girl by his side. It'll hurt forever, but at least he found a way to cope.


End file.
